I enjoy speaking in front of people if they enjoy what I am saying. It’s nice when an audience get involved, laugh when they’re meant to laugh and get horrified when they are meant to get horrified.

The enjoyment is dependent upon the reception of the audience, you can’t take it for granted.

We must talk about your expeditions. When did you realise you were going to be an explorer?

I was born three months after my father was killed in the war commanding a regiment which led the battle of EL Alamein and the landings in Italy in Salerno. I got brought up on stories about him and so the only thing I wanted to do was what he had done, to command the great Scottish cavalry regiment.

In those days it was called the Scots Greys, and so that’s right up until when you go to Sandhurst to try and get a commission. But by the time I got there, you couldn’t get into Sandhurst without O Levels. I was badly designed for getting O levels and therefore I could not get a regular commission so I couldn’t do what I wanted to do since I was a child.

I thought at the end of eight years the stupid rule about that would change and they’d let me stay on and I’d still make it to the top in the regiment but that never worked, they never changed the rules. So after eight years, however well you’ve done, you were chucked out.

You must have felt angry?

Yeah, you could look at it that way, I don’t know whether that rule still holds good or not. It might be totally different but back then I just thought it would change, and I would get to stay on but it didn’t.

Presumably back when you started your expeditions you didn’t have a huge team behind you. It must have been pretty hands on I would imagine.

Yes, when we started, I had been married for about a year and my wife at breakfast had a map and she said it would be a good idea to do the first journey round Earth before the enemy did, the Norwegians!

I’ve read that you’ve got a fear of heights and yet you climbed Mount Everest! How have you overcome these fears?

I’ve certainly not overcome all the fears that I’ve had. The one that you mentioned of vertigo, I’ve always had - if I can see the drop.

If I’m climbing tall buildings at night, and you can’t see down, I didn’t mind that, so it is a day time vertigo only.

But when my wife of thirty-eight years died twelve years ago I was just miserable and couldn’t do anything. To get myself out of self-misery for about a year I thought, well trying to get rid of my vertigo will perhaps be a big thing that might change and help me out a bit.

Therefore with vertigo you think, well Everest would be the answer but it wasn’t. After three attempts, and I only got to the top of Everest after three attempts, and at no point had I ever seen a drop.

If you want to climb Everest under the normal route and the normal times, you just don’t see drops. There is a little white shoulder below you but not a black drop and so it didn’t work, it didn’t test the vertigo.

The guide said that he knew of a place much closer to the UK to go on weekends, the North face of the Eiger in the Alps. He said that should get rid of your vertigo but I tried that eventually and it didn’t work so I stopped climbing mountains of any sort without drops.

Is it true that you played cricket in the South Pole?

When we reached the South Pole the ski plane which was dropping the parachutes had a cricket bat and ball and they brought them out and my wife’s Jack Russell loves ball games so he was very happy.

I didn’t play cricket, I never had done, but I filmed them playing cricket in the South Pole.

You have had some pretty hairy moments in your career. In the North Pole you started out earlier than originally planned - in February where temperatures were in the minus 60s. You spent 99 days floating in the Arctic Ocean – ice starting to melt. That must have been terrifying.

Oh yes, we did have a problem. We travelled 400 miles from the North Pole before it became too dangerous to try moving. We never gave up and never got rescued, hoping that our bit of ice would be like a boat. We put a tent up on this piece of ice and we waited, week after week, month after month.

Three months later we were still floating but the ice float was a lot smaller and with each crack, we moved the tent ahead of the crack. And just kept floating.

Eventually through amazing luck, the ship with the amazing crew of volunteers under a guy called Anton Bowring who will stop at nothing to get his mission done, that’s Charlie Burton and me, got his crew further north than any British ship, they damaged the hull which at one point started to sink.

They were stuck 28 miles away from us and it was quite a hairy journey because you can’t see the ship, you’ve got walls of ice ahead of you and in those days no sat nav or GPS or anything else like that and I suppose a lot of luck came into it.

We saw the ship and eventually got there through surface circumpolar navigation of the earth and became the first humans in history to go vertically round earth on the polar’s surface from Greenwich to Greenwich and got there just three years after we set out.

Can you remember the relief when you saw the ship?

Yes, the relief was just amazing. We’d been out on the moving ice for eight months and to see this ship, something not white, in many ways, was the greatest moment of the whole thing.

If it had failed, and it was looking like it would fail because the two of us were in in severe trouble. We would have wasted seven years of planning and three years travelling - ten years of our lives gone.

Such high stakes.

Big stakes, yes.

You’ve written so many books, both about your expeditions and works of fiction. How do you find the writing process – do you enjoy it?

It depends on the topic really. Sometimes they are enjoyable and sometimes they’re not. For instance, when you’re writing a book about crossing Antarctica for days the whole journey is white, there is no history, there were no birds or animals. If you were by yourself it would very difficult to write 97,000 words about it and stop the readers from going to sleep!

You live not far from Bath, in Exmoor. What drew you to the area?

I was brought up for 12 years in South Africa but my Mum settled over here in Sussex per chance and had to work in London. My late wife and didn’t really like Earls Court in a basement and once I got a job briefly for an American company and therefore got paid, we were able to look for somewhere where you couldn’t see anything man-made and you couldn’t hear anything man-made. It took three years looking to find such a place. And Exmoor and Dartmoor and Bodmin moor are all like that.

Who or what inspires you?

I basically am totally in awe of the two people I respect most. Although I didn’t ever meet them, my Dad and my Grandad. I got bought up on stories about them. And in Antarctica, you know, you’ve got frostbite, gangrene and so on and you want to give up and then you think that they’re watching you and you don’t want to give up because it might make them ashamed. They are a very good source of motivation.

Lastly, what do you do when you’re relaxing?

I like to go out with my wife and daughter (she’s 11) whenever we have the time and I’m not away lecturing.

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